Electronically Monitored Punishment: International and Critical Perspectives - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0415625955 ISBN 13: 9780415625951

Publisher: Willan, 2012

Synopsis

Electronic monitoring (EM) is a way of supervising offenders in the community whilst they are on bail, serving a community sentence or after release from prison. Various technologies can be used, including voice verification, GPS satellite tracking and – most commonly - the use of radio frequency to monitor house arrest. It originated in the USA in the 1980s and has spread to over 30 countries since then. This book explores the development of EM in a number of countries to give some indication of the diverse ways it has been utilized and of the complex politics which surrounds its use.

A techno-utopian impulse underpins the origins of EM and has remained latent in its subsequent development elsewhere in the world, despite recognition that is it less capable of effecting penal transformations than its champions have hoped. This book devotes substantive chapters to the issues of privatisation, evaluation, offender perspectives and ethics. Whilst normatively more committed to the Swedish model, the book acknowledges that this may not represent the future of EM, whose untrammelled, commercially-driven development could have very alarming consequences for criminal justice.

Both utopian and dystopian hopes have been invested in EM, but research on its impact is ambivalent and fragmented, and EM remains undertheorised, empirically and ethically. This book seeks to redress this by providing academics, policy audiences and practitioners with the intellectual resources to understand and address the challenges which EM poses.

About this title

About the Author

Mike Nellis is Emeritus Professor of Criminal and Community Justice in the School of Law, University of Strathclyde, UK. He was formerly a social worker with young offenders, has a PhD from the Institute of Criminology in Cambridge, and was involved in the training of probation officers at the University of Birmingham. He has written widely on the fortunes of the probation service, alternatives to imprisonment and particularly the electronic monitoring of offenders.

Kristel Beyens is Professor of Penology and Criminology at the Criminology Department of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. She has published on prison overcrowding, sentencing and the implementation of prison sentences and sentences in the community, such as electronic monitoring and community service. She is a member of the editorial board of the European Journal of Probation and of the European Working Group on Community Sanctions.

Dan Kaminski is Professor at the UCLouvain (University of Louvain-la-Neuve), Belgium, and President of the CRID&P (Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Deviance and Penality). He holds a PhD in Criminology and has published on managerialism, penal treatment of drug use, prisoners' rights, alternatives to prison and electronic monitoring.

Edition details

• Publisher: Willan
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0415625955
• ISBN 13: 9780415625951
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 292
• Editor: Nellis Mike, Beyens Kristel, Kaminski Dan